You Can Travel Around The World Without Leaving Your Armchair

January 29, 1989|By WILLIAM A. DAVIS, The Boston Globe

Travel books continue to roll off the presses in ever-growing numbers, but the demand seems to be increasing at an even faster rate.

This season`s crop of books runs the gamut from vivid first-person accounts of harrowing adventures, through detailed guides to offbeat destinations, to glossy, profusely illustrated volumes that often nearly replicate a trip to the destinations they describe.

Here is a subjective selection of recent travel books that can be curled up with on dreary winter nights, taken along on a journey, or given as presents to travelers who have everything, except perhaps a round-trip ticket to that special somewhere.

-- Hawaii, photographs by Dennis Stock; Abrams (160 pp., $95).

This comes pretty close to being the ultimate coffeetable book: large (11 3/4 by 16 1/2 inches), luscious (155 full-color photos), undemanding (it has no written introduction, text or captions), and expensive.

Hawaii, the work of veteran photographer Dennis Stock, consists of page after page of acute, evocative and often sensual photographs. All the things that make the Hawaiian islands unique are here: hula dancers, spectacular sunsets, surfers, lava formations, lush vegetation, brilliantly colored tropical fish and a racial rainbow of human types.

Grossfeld, a Boston Globe photographer who has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, traveled across Siberia in midwinter, visiting places no American had been before and braving temperatures that can drop so low that sometimes the exhalation of one`s breath produces an eerie sound Siberians call ``the Whisper of Stars.`` Grossfeld never heard the stars whisper, although he met people who had -- and were near freezing to death at the time.

He kept his eyes open and his camera ready and came back with a string of images -- there are 160 photos in the book, culled from the more than 4,000 pictures he took -- that reinforces Siberia`s reputation as a remote and often harsh place, but makes it seem human and understandable, too. Pictures of ordinary Siberian life -- fur-swaddled children, steam-wreathed railroad engines, cheerful folk dancers, frozen laundry, gigantic prefabricated apartment blocks and weather-beaten hunters, among others -- linger long in the mind, countering some of the less-focused mental images most of us have of Russian society.

The text is straightforward, a personal account of what Grossfeld saw and did, and accompanies the stunning photographs perfectly.

No range of mountains has quite the grip on our imaginations as the Himalayas: the ``Mountains of the Gods`` to those who dwell in and around them, and the ultimate challenge for trekkers and mountaineers from every part of the globe.

Illustrated with more than 300 color photographs, Himalayas covers every aspect of the great peaks from geologic origins to their mythology, sacred sites, nomadic native peoples, temples and monasteries, indigenous art, and the Sherpa guides and foreign explorers who have tried to conquer the Himalayas..

-- This Marvelous Terrible Place, by Ev Momatiuk and John Eastcott; Camden House (159 pp., $19.95).

This very atmospheric book is a tribute to the outporters, the residents of the isolated, self-contained fishing villages once clustered around tiny coves all along the coastline of Canada`s easternmost province. Clinging precariously to the edge of the sea, they were places of human marvels and natural terrors.

Most of the outports have been abandoned, their inhabitants relocated near towns on the highway system where there are social services and better chances of regular work. But, many outporters miss their old homes and the hard but rich and rewarding lives they had there. ``It was different, definitely different,`` recalled Ivan James, formerly of Parsons Harbour. ``If we went into the country and killed meat, we`d share it with everybody ... what one had, we all had.``

Through interviews with outporters and often haunting photographs of the lonely, foggy settlements they live in -- or used to live in -- This Marvelous Terrible Place paints a vivid portrait of a vanishing way of life.

-- The End of the Game, by Peter H. Beard; Chronicle Books (224 pp., $19.95).

Originally published in 1965, End of the Game is a classic book on African wildlife. Beard, who went to Africa fresh from Yale in 1961, documented through his photographs, and historic paintings and photos, the fate of the great animal herds of the African veld.

The new edition, which has more than 300 illustrations -- including copies of letters, diaries and gamebooks of writer Isak Dinesen, the great lion hunter Col. John H. Patterson, and other African pioneers -- is ironically subtitled The Last Word From Paradise and brings the story up-to-date.